Tree farm balances new growth with old values

Friday

Aug 19, 2011 at 2:00 AM

If you happen to want a parrotia, an evodia, a halesia. or even a thujopsis, you can get one – several even – in Osterville. And in the bargain, you can also see a couple of antique radios and an old pot-bellied stove.

Ellen Chahey

ELLEN C. CHAHEY PHOTOS FAMILY BUSINESS – Arnie Johnson, right, poses with two of his three sons, Carl, left, and Ben, center. Barry, not pictured, was also working on their Osterville tree farm.

Multigenerational business maintains traditions

If you happen to want a parrotia, an evodia, a halesia. or even a thujopsis, you can get one – several even – in Osterville. And in the bargain, you can also see a couple of antique radios and an old pot-bellied stove.

You’d be heading to the HF Johnson Tree Farm on Bumps River Road, near Cape Cod Academy.

“It’s a nice job,” said Arnie Johnson, the third generation to operate the farm, which began in 1920 as a landscaping business on a property in Centerville where Johnson now lives. The business moved to Osterville in 1961.His three sons work with him, and now a preschool-age grandson is starting to show an interest in the machinery for a Johnson specialty since 1987 – moving trees.

“We pick up where the garden centers leave off” in terms of the size of trees they can move, Johnson said, and explained that their equipment can carry trees with 45 to 50 feet tall with trunks that are 14 or 15 inches around. The major limiting factor in moving a tree, he said, is whether it can clear electric lines along the route to its new location.

Back in the day of the tree-moving business, Johnson said, the work was “all shovels and picks and chains” and it took all day to move one tree. Now, thanks to trucks equipped with giant jaws, “we can move 10 trees in a day,” he said.

Each morning at seven, Johnson said, he and his sons Barry, Carl, and Ben sit down to plan the day’s work. “We guarantee our work for a year, and have a lot of teamwork with the tree companies that do the aftercare” for trees that they sell or relocate.

In addition to the exotics in their inventory, the Johnsons also carry many popular and familiar tree choices. Evergreens are well-liked for screening property lines, and there’s always a market for flowering trees such as dogwoods, magnolias, and cherries, Johnson said.

“I give my father and grandfather a lot of credit,” said Johnson, who began his work in the family business repairing machinery. To this day, he said, “we fix up used things,” with the result that the business has “no huge debts.” They also own a nursery in Marstons Mills and are starting another one in Sandwich, adding up to 21 acres in all.

The Osterville office is a simple building that is heated by – what else? – wood. The working wood stove is modern, but next to it sits a pot-bellied stove that the business got in exchange for some tree work. Johnson said that it once heated a shack that housed workers who were digging the original Hyannis water system.

So what’s with those two radios, the kind housed in big clunky wood cabinets?

One, Johnson explained, was from a house on a family farm in Maine. “We had to have one for the news,” he said, recalling that the location was so remote that “they didn’t even have a newspaper up there.” The antenna, he remembered, was hooked up through the springs of a bed on the second floor to boost its power. The other, from his wife’s family, was a gift from his father-in-law.

Do they work? “Well,” Johnson deadpanned, “they hum. They get warm.”

Johnson, who grew up in Centerville and still lives there, said that even through that village and Osterville have a historic rivalry, “I couldn’t be more fortunate” to have a business in Osterville, which he called “an ideal spot” to get to jobs both down-Cape and off-Cape (Boston, Providence, and even Maine).

“Osterville’s been great for working families like ours,” he said, “because of the sense of trust. Here, I’m ‘Harry’s boy’ who knows everybody. And when we sell a tree here, we get to see where it goes.”

Before Johnson took a visitor for a walk among the trees, under a blue August sky in which a hawk circled high looking for a dinner of rabbit, he paused to recall a Scripture that he said describes his life on the tree farm.

“Isn’t there,” he asked, “a verse in Ecclesiastes about the joy of labor?”